Week Notes 68: Family Camp at NeeKauNis

This post is 68 of 68 in the series week notes.

General #

We took the kids to NeeKauNis for family camp. It was our first time attending. We had a great time¹. The kids were able to roam free. Within minutes of arriving, Mira made a new best friend. They were glued together for most of camp. A beautiful sight.

Parenting #

There is a lot to say about parenting while at Family Camp. It’s essentially all that Meg and I talked about whenever we had a spare moment. I’ll just say a few things as bullet points here.

Mixed age groups. I love the way that kids of various ages play together. They naturally make a sort of ad hoc culture. I spent a lot of time in the Meeting Center “supervising” the kids and being fascinated by their multiple simultaneous and partially overlapping games².
Stepping outside of time. I think that children tend to live outside of time. They wake up when they wake up, and they go to sleep when they are sleepy. Parents impose time on their children. At camp, we lived much more child-like lives. I left my watch and phone in the cabin for most of the week. We didn’t worry one bit about how long we stayed at the sand box. The bell told us when to come for worship and for meals.
Announcements. Throughout the week, there were lots of periods of announcements. And they were conducted just as one would at Meeting: taking input from the floor, listening carefully to each suggestion, working out the various implications of what was said. For normal people, this would be very boring. And yet, I think it’s a subtle way to get children used to Quaker process.
Chores. All the camps at NeeKauNis have a lot of time for chores. Everyone is on a “meal setup and dishes” crew. There is a mandatory work period before lunch. These tasks really bring the kids in to collaboration. I raked acorns for three days. At long last, a friend raking with me said: “You know, I think this is just make-work now. It’s a fool’s errand.” And when kids showed up to help, she found even more acorns to rake. It turns out that pushing a wheelbarrow can be a three person job if you value collaboration highly enough.

Reading #

The prophetic word: Ancient and modern by Moses Bailey

This seems to be a study guide for Meetings to read through the Old Testament prophets. I liked the tone of it, and hope to read more. It put forward a nice secular-humanist argument for reading the Old Testament: You get to experience a long history of another culture. The more we get used to “reading” other cultures, the more tolerant and flexible we will become.

Writing #

I had to do a bit of TA hiring related administration while we were at camp, and this necessitated going online and checking my e-mail. When I opened up my e-mail, I found out that the paper on Growing Linearly Independent Sets was accepted³ while we were at camp! That paper has been brewing since Week Notes 47. I’m glad to know that it will eventually be out there in the big world.

As I was walking the labyrinth at camp, I came up with a new-to-me way to build a labyrinth. One does the usual low-dimensional topology thing: pick a diffeomorphism of a disk that fixes the boundary and iterate it. If you look at the image of a simple curve under the iteration, then you will get very complicated but simple path. This construction has a lot of flexibility because there are lots of diffeomorphisms. I’m going to check with a friend who specializes in artistic mathematical labyrinths, and see if this new construction would make a reasonable project.

Links #

Lessons from a high-fertility subculture - Works in Progress Magazine: Details on how having kids in Chabad works.
Ian’s Fast Shoelace Knot: I learned this very efficient knot at Family Camp. Learning a new way to tie your shoes, as an adult, is an odd experience. The muscle memory for “the normal way” is so strong.
Ylvis - Trucker’s Hitch [Official music video HD] - YouTube: How have I never seen this before?! This is ridiculous and I love it.
The Wildlings | RPG | RPGGeek: a lovely minimal story telling game suitable for five year olds.
- PDF: The Wildlings
- PDF: The Wildlings: Forests Dark and Caverns Deep Expansion

As with camping at Presquile: this sort of outing is not fun yet. It is definitely tending in the direction of fun, but is still a lot of work. ↩︎
As I wrote this, I realized that it lines up well with Buckminster Fuller’s definition of the universe: “Universe is the aggregate of all humanity’s consciously apprehended and communicated nonsimultaneous and only partially overlapping experiences.” (From Synergetics 301.00-302.00). ↩︎
The acceptance is conditional on some major revisions, but nothing unreasonable. It will be routine to make the recommended changed. ↩︎

Published: Jul 31, 2026 @ 19:00.
Last Modified: Aug 2, 2026 @ 09:34.

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